Power-Aware Beam Steering and Beamforming for High-Power Antennas: Architectures, Physical Limits, Modeling, and Design Guidelines

Directional control at high transmitted power is important for satellite and space RF links, scientific high-power RF and pulsed-RF facilities, accelerator systems, and wireless power transfer. A beam-control architecture that performs well at low power can become impractical when local field enhancement, insertion loss, mismatch, thermal gradients, nonlinear contacts, protective-window interfaces, and environment-dependent breakdown are considered together. This article is a review: it reports no new measurement data, beam-control device, electromagnetic model, or thermal model. Its original contribution is an integrative framework that connects architecture selection to the physical limits and strength of the available evidence. The review compares mechanically steered apertures, passive multibeam networks, active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs), true-time-delay (TTD) arrays, reflectarrays and transmitarrays, leaky-wave antennas, lenses, and reconfigurable surfaces. It separates atmospheric and pressurized-gas limits from vacuum-specific multipactor; distinguishes measured, simulated, mixed, and field-scaled claims; introduces a unified-assumption screening example for beam-angle stability and insertion-loss heating; and links array synthesis to field extraction, circuit, electrothermal, thermomechanical, nonlinear, calibration, and qualification analyses. The synthesis shows why no single architecture dominates. Mechanical and passive approaches favor low loss and power handling, AESAs favor agility, TTD favors wide instantaneous bandwidth, and planar or reconfigurable apertures exchange feed simplicity for cell-level field and tuning-device stress. The review closes with design guidance and research priorities for high-power tuning, compact delay control, embedded sensing, and multiphysics lifetime prediction.